Evaluation Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

When we started planning our film we instantly knew that we wanted it to be aimed at teenagers so the obvious thing to do would be to have teenage characters. Of course in our opening we are only introduced to two characters, our main protagonist Beth and the hooded figure who's identity we do not know.

Protagonist

 

Name: Beth

When going with the name of the character we didn't really have a preference due to the fact that she wasn't going to speak anyway, so we just decided to use Beth's name to make life a lot easier and not waste time figuring out a name for our character.

Age: 16

Again, the age of our character was just by chance because that is how old Beth really is, however in the real film this would also be the case as we wanted a teenage character who was fairly in the middle of their teenage years, we wanted a independent teenage who had a lot of freedom so going with a 13/14 year old wouldn't have been practical enough for what we were trying to do with our character.

Race: White British

In terms of the race of our character, we didn't really think heavily about this as we had already decided that Beth was going to be the main character but race wasn't really a factor as to why we chose Beth to be in it. It was purely because Beth was up for being in it.

Class: Working/Middle Class

Although for me personally looking back I would possibly have people of a higher class in our film but we decided to use fairly normal teenagers who are in danger, however I think it would be effective if we used a group of rich kids who despite their wealth, were unsafe and being hunted.

Gender: Female

Despite the fact that our character was female simply by chance we also wanted to slightly conform to traditional thriller/horror movies and include a female being hunted but we decided to twist this on its head after originally wanting her to be quite weak. We thought that we could change ours slightly and have a strong independent female character who despite moments of weakness she is strong for her age and is able to give the hooded figure a run for their money.

Antagonist

Name: Unknown

Age: Unknown

Race: Unknown

Class: Unknown

Gender: Unknown

For all of these sections we decided that we wanted our antagonist to be completely unknown due to the common conventions of a thriller/horror film. Our plan would be for the antagonist to be revealed at the end of the film. Of course for filming purposes our antagonist was a white, female who is in the age category that our film is for. However if it came to filming the actual thing, this would probably be completely different and the antagonist would possibly even be male.

Characters that influenced our protagonist...

When looking at possible characters we focussed mainly on female characters that had played strong parts in some famous movies. Although we did not look at thrillers to do this, we knew the type of character we wanted out protagonist to be and most thriller films did not include this type of character.

Instead we focussed on sci-fi/action to find the type of female we wanted ours to relate to. We looked at characters like Katniss Everdeen (from The Hunger Games Trilogy), Princess Leia (from Star Wars) and Tris Prior (from The Divergent Series).

I chose to focus mainly on Princess Leia and look at her strong character and sense of humour throughout the films. Despite the fact that we were making a Thriller we still wanted our character to be resilient, maybe not extremely humorous, but like Leia we wanted her to be tough and ready for anything that was thrown at her, whilst still having some (but few) moments of weakness.

We thought the having a character like Leia would represent our female character in a very strong way. It would show women being strong and the type of character that people watching the film would look up to and want to be like.

However due to the fact that Star Wars is a completely different setting/genre of film there are of course some differences between our character and Leia.

Leia is a princess, and so has been brought up with a wealthy family and have obviously been trained to fight and protect herself because she is a princess.

Another difference is that Leia is not alone for the majority of the film and she is surrounded by other people in a team, although at the beginning she is alone.

Her clothing would also be a difference as we made sure that Beth was wearing clothes that would be worn by a teenager, however Leia is clearly not.

Overall I think that our film represents teenagers in a good light, our female teenage character is strong and resilient. Our antagonist however, is clearly not liked but we do not yet know what kind of social group they would be from so they don't currently represent any type of social group in a good or bad light.